On a future road trip, your robot car decides to take a new route, driving you past a Krispy Kreme Doughnut shop. A pop-up window opens on your car’s display and asks if you’d like to stop at the store. “Don’t mind if I do,” you think to yourself. You press “yes” on the touchscreen, and the autonomous car pulls up to the shop.

Wait, how did the car know that you might want an original glazed doughnut? Because it has data on your driving habits, and you’re a serial offender when it comes to impulsive snacking. Your car is also linked to your online accounts at home, and you had recently “liked” Krispy Kreme’s Facebook page and visited its website.

Is this future scenario convenient—or creepy? It’s one thing if a car’s driver-drowsiness detection system (which exists today) sees that you’re nodding off and suggests coffee. But to make your automated car divert from its usual course because some advertiser paid it to do so, well, that sounds like a mini-carjacking.

Whatever you think of it, this future may be coming up on the road ahead. At the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) earlier this month in Las Vegas, automakers announced deals to deliver online services or in-car apps to web-enabled cars of tomorrow. And where there are free or cheap online services, there’s online advertising—that train is never late.

We don’t know what that advertising might look like: It could literally steer your future car, or it could be more familiar, such as streaming ads across your windshield in auto-driving mode (maybe too distracting in manual-driving mode). But because ad revenue is still the dominant e-business model, it’s a safe bet that advertising will be coming to a future car near you. After all, Google’s acquisition of Nest—maker of “smart” thermostats and other appliances—last week appears to be its first step toward owning the Internet of Things. If the technology giant is leaping the firewall of your personal computer to the rest of your home, why not also your car? Apple co-founder Steve Jobs reportedly had hoped to bring an “iCar” to market, essentially a huge iPhone with wheels.

Could advertisers really influence the route taken by a self-driving car? It seems plausible, and legal, in at least some circumstances. Say there are multiple routes to your destination. Some may be shorter in terms of distance but longer in terms of travel time, or some routes are equidistant. In those cases, there’s no obviously “right” route to take, but advertiser money could be a “plus factor” that’s just enough to tip driving algorithms in their direction.

This practice doesn’t seem to be a big inconvenience for the car’s passengers, as long as the detour doesn’t add much extra time or distance to their trip. Some taxi drivers and hotel concierges are known to accept kickbacks from restaurants, casinos, strip clubs, and other establishments to steer business toward them. So this already happens today. But even if not illegal, it raises ethical questions and the need for transparency in a world run by algorithms most of us don’t understand.

More Ethical Potholes

Privacy is already a chief worry about in-car apps and robotics more generally, which some predict to be the next battleground for civil liberties. The doughnut scenario above speaks to that fear. Distracted driving could be made worse with in-car apps, as this hilarious video predicts. But there are other, less obvious problems to think about too:

A couple of weeks ago, a Massachusetts man was arrested when allegedly his Google+ account automatically emailed invitations to everyone in his address book, including his ex-girlfriend who had a restraining order against him, without his knowledge. Something similar could happen with robot cars, such as driving a registered sex offender right by a school when he isn’t supposed to be within 2,000 feet of them. Who would be to blame: the human behind the wheel, or the self-driving car?

An owner of a shiny new robot car probably wouldn’t appreciate being deliberately driven past fast-food restaurants if she’s on a diet, or by a cluster of bars if she’s a recovering alcoholic, or toward maternity stores if she hasn’t publicly revealed her pregnancy.

As one automotive vice-president unwisely pointed out at CES, “We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you’re doing it. We have GPS in your car, so we know what you're doing. By the way, we don’t supply that data to anyone.” This raises the issue of whether capability implies responsibility: Are you morally obligated to act on information that could prevent serious harm to someone? For instance, if an intelligence agency collects data that strongly suggest an impending terrorist attack, it seems wrong not to warn the public or try stopping the attack.

As this applies to automated cars and certain people, it could be the duty of manufacturers to not only figure out where a car’s driver should go, but also where he or she should not go. In some distant future, if the locations of most people can be pinpointed through GPS and other methods, a robot car could tell when a driver is about to violate a restraining order and then refuse to travel there. If they have the data to connect the dots, they probably should do it when it matters.

And it doesn’t just matter for legal reasons, but other factors could be important to users of future wired cars. An owner of a shiny new robot car probably wouldn’t appreciate being deliberately driven—because of advertisers—past fast-food restaurants if she’s on a diet, or by a cluster of bars if she’s a recovering alcoholic, or toward maternity stores if she hasn’t publicly revealed her pregnancy.

It could be that drivers and passengers can instruct cars to avoid certain destinations. Putting aside the question of why we should be imposed upon like this at all, if the car were to drive to those verboten destinations anyway, that’s probably wrong. Recall in Isaac Asimov’s novels that the second law of robotics is to always obey human orders (where they don’t violate the first rule to not cause or allow harm to humans).

However, resisting humans is a major point of autonomous cars: We humans are often error-prone and reckless, while algorithms and unblinking sensors can physically drive better than us in most if not all cases. An automated vehicle is designed precisely to disregard our orders where they are imminently risky. That’s to say, refusing human orders is sometimes a feature, not a bug. It’s unclear, then, whether opting-out of certain destinations (or opting-in) is reason enough for cars to comply with those commands.

* * *

The app itself is becoming the new killer app. The latest Windows 8 machines mimic the app dashboards on Apple OS and Android mobile phones. And we can expect online applications to be part of future cars, robotic or not. As existing apps on our mobile phones and computers are already doing now, in-car apps will raise a host of legal and ethical dilemmas, from privacy and beyond.

The problem I discussed at the beginning was related to advertising, but advertising itself isn’t the problem. At their best, advertising could be helpful video clips or images that educate you about products and solutions you truly might be interested in. At their worst, they’re annoyances that interrupt your concentration while you’re absorbed in an essay, video, podcast, or video game. Ads can push you to vote one way, or buy this thing you don’t need. They could make you into a worse person—or a better person.

So while advertising gets a lot of criticism, ads seem to be a necessary evil if the consumer wants to pay as little as possible. That’s neither here nor there in our discussion now, but the decision to allow a car to be controlled by third-parties—directing the route for an advertiser’s interests and not the car owner’s—is the real problem. Advertising inside a wired car is not just about showing you tantalizing stuff, but it could be about driving you physically to that stuff. This paradigm shift would make ads even more invasive than critics today might imagine.

More seriously, manufacturers will also need to make hard life-and-death choices in programming autonomous cars, and these decisions should be considered thoughtfully, openly, to ensure a responsible product that millions will buy, ride in, and possibly be injured with. That’s all the more reason to focus on ethics—not just on law, as we’re doing at the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford (CARS)—in steering the future of transportation in the right direction.

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His paranoid style paved the road for Trumpism. Now he fears what’s been unleashed.

Glenn Beck looks like the dad in a Disney movie. He’s earnest, geeky, pink, and slightly bulbous. His idea of salty language is bullcrap.

The atmosphere at Beck’s Mercury Studios, outside Dallas, is similarly soothing, provided you ignore the references to genocide and civilizational collapse. In October, when most commentators considered a Donald Trump presidency a remote possibility, I followed audience members onto the set of The Glenn Beck Program, which airs on Beck’s website, theblaze.com. On the way, we passed through a life-size replica of the Oval Office as it might look if inhabited by a President Beck, complete with a portrait of Ronald Reagan and a large Norman Rockwell print of a Boy Scout.

Should you drink more coffee? Should you take melatonin? Can you train yourself to need less sleep? A physician’s guide to sleep in a stressful age.

During residency, Iworked hospital shifts that could last 36 hours, without sleep, often without breaks of more than a few minutes. Even writing this now, it sounds to me like I’m bragging or laying claim to some fortitude of character. I can’t think of another type of self-injury that might be similarly lauded, except maybe binge drinking. Technically the shifts were 30 hours, the mandatory limit imposed by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, but we stayed longer because people kept getting sick. Being a doctor is supposed to be about putting other people’s needs before your own. Our job was to power through.

The shifts usually felt shorter than they were, because they were so hectic. There was always a new patient in the emergency room who needed to be admitted, or a staff member on the eighth floor (which was full of late-stage terminally ill people) who needed me to fill out a death certificate. Sleep deprivation manifested as bouts of anger and despair mixed in with some euphoria, along with other sensations I’ve not had before or since. I remember once sitting with the family of a patient in critical condition, discussing an advance directive—the terms defining what the patient would want done were his heart to stop, which seemed likely to happen at any minute. Would he want to have chest compressions, electrical shocks, a breathing tube? In the middle of this, I had to look straight down at the chart in my lap, because I was laughing. This was the least funny scenario possible. I was experiencing a physical reaction unrelated to anything I knew to be happening in my mind. There is a type of seizure, called a gelastic seizure, during which the seizing person appears to be laughing—but I don’t think that was it. I think it was plain old delirium. It was mortifying, though no one seemed to notice.

Why did Trump’s choice for national-security advisor perform so well in the war on terror, only to find himself forced out of the Defense Intelligence Agency?

How does a man like retired Lieutenant General Mike Flynn—who spent his life sifting through information and parsing reports, separating rumor and innuendo from actionable intelligence—come to promote conspiracy theories on social media?

Perhaps it’s less Flynn who’s changed than that the circumstances in which he finds himself—thriving in some roles, and flailing in others.

In diagnostic testing, there’s a basic distinction between sensitivity, or the ability to identify positive results, and specificity, the ability to exclude negative ones. A test with high specificity may avoid generating false positives, but at the price of missing many diagnoses. One with high sensitivity may catch those tricky diagnoses, but also generate false positives along the way. Some people seem to sift through information with high sensitivity, but low specificity—spotting connections that others can’t, and perhaps some that aren’t even there.

“Well, you’re just special. You’re American,” remarked my colleague, smirking from across the coffee table. My other Finnish coworkers, from the school in Helsinki where I teach, nodded in agreement. They had just finished critiquing one of my habits, and they could see that I was on the defensive.

I threw my hands up and snapped, “You’re accusing me of being too friendly? Is that really such a bad thing?”

“Well, when I greet a colleague, I keep track,” she retorted, “so I don’t greet them again during the day!” Another chimed in, “That’s the same for me, too!”

Unbelievable, I thought. According to them, I’m too generous with my hellos.

When I told them I would do my best to greet them just once every day, they told me not to change my ways. They said they understood me. But the thing is, now that I’ve viewed myself from their perspective, I’m not sure I want to remain the same. Change isn’t a bad thing. And since moving to Finland two years ago, I’ve kicked a few bad American habits.

Why the ingrained expectation that women should desire to become parents is unhealthy

In 2008, Nebraska decriminalized child abandonment. The move was part of a "safe haven" law designed to address increased rates of infanticide in the state. Like other safe-haven laws, parents in Nebraska who felt unprepared to care for their babies could drop them off in a designated location without fear of arrest and prosecution. But legislators made a major logistical error: They failed to implement an age limitation for dropped-off children.

Within just weeks of the law passing, parents started dropping off their kids. But here's the rub: None of them were infants. A couple of months in, 36 children had been left in state hospitals and police stations. Twenty-two of the children were over 13 years old. A 51-year-old grandmother dropped off a 12-year-old boy. One father dropped off his entire family -- nine children from ages one to 17. Others drove from neighboring states to drop off their children once they heard that they could abandon them without repercussion.

Democrats who have struggled for years to sell the public on the Affordable Care Act are now confronting a far more urgent task: mobilizing a political coalition to save it.

Even as the party reels from last month’s election defeat, members of Congress, operatives, and liberal allies have turned to plotting a campaign against repealing the law that, they hope, will rival the Tea Party uprising of 2009 that nearly scuttled its passage in the first place. A group of progressive advocacy groups will announce on Friday a coordinated effort to protect the beneficiaries of the Affordable Care Act and stop Republicans from repealing the law without first identifying a plan to replace it.

They don’t have much time to fight back. Republicans on Capitol Hill plan to set repeal of Obamacare in motion as soon as the new Congress opens in January, and both the House and Senate could vote to wind down the law immediately after President-elect Donald Trump takes the oath of office on the 20th.

Trinidad has the highest rate of Islamic State recruitment in the Western hemisphere. How did this happen?

This summer, the so-called Islamic State published issue 15 of its online magazine Dabiq. In what has become a standard feature, it ran an interview with an ISIS foreign fighter. “When I was around twenty years old I would come to accept the religion of truth, Islam,” said Abu Sa’d at-Trinidadi, recalling how he had turned away from the Christian faith he was born into.

At-Trinidadi, as his nom de guerre suggests, is from the Caribbean island of Trinidad and Tobago (T&T), a country more readily associated with calypso and carnival than the “caliphate.” Asked if he had a message for “the Muslims of Trinidad,” he condemned his co-religionists at home for remaining in “a place where you have no honor and are forced to live in humiliation, subjugated by the disbelievers.” More chillingly, he urged Muslims in T&T to wage jihad against their fellow citizens: “Terrify the disbelievers in their own homes and make their streets run with their blood.”

A professor of cognitive science argues that the world is nothing like the one we experience through our senses.

As we go about our daily lives, we tend to assume that our perceptions—sights, sounds, textures, tastes—are an accurate portrayal of the real world. Sure, when we stop and think about it—or when we find ourselves fooled by a perceptual illusion—we realize with a jolt that what we perceive is never the world directly, but rather our brain’s best guess at what that world is like, a kind of internal simulation of an external reality. Still, we bank on the fact that our simulation is a reasonably decent one. If it wasn’t, wouldn’t evolution have weeded us out by now? The true reality might be forever beyond our reach, but surely our senses give us at least an inkling of what it’s really like.

The same part of the brain that allows us to step into the shoes of others also helps us restrain ourselves.

You’ve likely seen the video before: a stream of kids, confronted with a single, alluring marshmallow. If they can resist eating it for 15 minutes, they’ll get two. Some do. Others cave almost immediately.

This “Marshmallow Test,” first conducted in the 1960s, perfectly illustrates the ongoing war between impulsivity and self-control. The kids have to tamp down their immediate desires and focus on long-term goals—an ability that correlates with their later health, wealth, and academic success, and that is supposedly controlled by the front part of the brain. But a new study by Alexander Soutschek at the University of Zurich suggests that self-control is also influenced by another brain region—and one that casts this ability in a different light.

A new survey suggests many might prefer a kind of multipolar Washington, with three distinct orbits of power checking each other.

Does Donald Trump have a mandate?

Though last month’s election provided Trump and his fellow Republicans unified control of the White House, House of Representatives, and Senate for the first time since 2006, the latest Allstate/Atlantic Media Heartland Monitor Poll shows the country remains closely split on many of the key policy challenges facing the incoming administration—and sharply divided on whether they trust the next president to take the lead in responding to them.

In addition, on several important choices facing the new administration and Congress, the survey found that respondents who voted for Trump supported a position that was rejected by the majority of adults overall. That contrast may simultaneously encourage Trump to press forward on an agenda that energizes his coalition, while emboldening congressional Democrats to resist him.